Christian Kerschner

Christian Kerschner holds a PhD in Ecological Economics from ICTA and his main area of interest are resource scarcities and general issues of economic scale. He started his academic formation with an MA in Business and Economics at the University of Vienna. He read two of this four-year course in England: first at the University of Reading and then at Westminster University. In his master thesis he analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of the steady-state economy (SSE) as a policy option for sustainability. In 2006 he received a Masters degree in Ecological Economics also from ICTA, after having spent 7 months at the University of Leeds as a Marie Curie Fellow. For his PhD thesis he completed 4 more research months each in Leeds and in Groningen (The Netherlands). It covers four main topic areas: Firstly he offers a general energy-systematic conceptualization of the phenomenon of Peak Oil within its quality and quantity dimensions, followed by an extensive impact and vulnerability analysis using an Input-Output methodology. This part of Christian’s thesis contains his latest article, where he and his colleagues provide a Peak-Oil vulnerability map of the US economy. Thirdly he and his colleague Melf-Hinrich Ehlers, developed a framework for analyzing attitudes towards technology, which they supported and improved with the results of an online survey among sustainability researchers. Finally Christian authored an influential article consolidating the Steady-State Economy with the newly emerging field of economic de-growth and provided insights into the backgrounds of the SSE.